Coming down the trail down to the water was one of the most surreal fishing experiences I’ve ever been a part of. Once we reached the water Dad and I walked upstream to cross over the pool so that my brother-in-law, Dale, and George could fish the bank we walked in on. As we set […]
George kept several crab traps that we would fill with the leftover salmon heads. A few days later once you’ve had enough smoked salmon salad spaghetti we’d pull the crab pots and eat several hundred dollars worth of Dungeness crab each. The first trip we went on I was so excited to pull the crab […]
I’m not an artist and have no plans of trying to become one. It felt necessary to address the illustrations that have accompanied several posts. I feel like we can have a discussion about them now that I’ve been as honest with you as I can be. I have a handful of photographs and a […]
“This is all you need to catch fish up here,” George said earlier in the day as he handed out egg sucking leech patterns he had tied back home. They were #6 size royal purple leech patterns with bright orange yarn eggs tied near the eye of the hook. We tossed the leech pattern along […]
The second to last day of our first trip Tom asked if I’d like to accompany him in his boat to go into the towns of Point Baker and Port Protection. Being nineteen and not experienced enough to be nervous about getting into boats with strangers, I obliged. He was running in to get fuel […]
I went back and forth on the third rule of camping and fishing in Southeast Alaska, but I decided that it wasn’t nearly a rule as much as a suggestion. It has apparently been a long-running joke in Alaska that the official state bird is the Mosquito. During the day it seems like they’re out […]
“Look! We’ve spotted our first bear!” Dad joked as George greeted us coming off of the float plane. George had a welded metal houseboat docked on the backside of the harbor just out of sight from Tom’s. It was painted in camouflage as well which made it very difficult to spot. An entire story […]
For the few hours that it gets dark in Alaska during the late summer, it gets really dark. Remember, there’s an almost guaranteed chance that it’s either raining, or the sky is overcast so there’s almost no chance you’re going to have any moonlight. It’s at that moment that you realize just how dark a […]
There’s so much that can go wrong when trying to catch a fish on a fly rod. There’s at a minimum 4 knots that connect the fly to the reel. Hook sets are critical to fly fishing as well, and they can be very species specific. You certainly don’t set the hook the same way on trout […]
It’s difficult not to philosophize when discussing fly fishing. The mixture of science (objectivity) versus art (subjectivity) demands it at a certain point. In the beginning, it feels like a black art. The cast seems like something only a sorcerer could master. The mind hardly even knows where to begin at this point. The […]
Tales from East Yahtam 